To Shop or Not to Shop

Seeing as how I have a book to copy edit this week, I figured that this must be the perfect time for a blog post!

There's quite a lot going on at the moment, really. Aside from the obvious (the book I have to copy edit and the book I have to write), it's hockey season once again (Yay!), my horse and I have entered therapy together (it's a long story), and the holiday season is creeping inexorably closer.

I love the holiday season. I love spending time with my family (even if I have to fly to Tennessee to do it), I love holiday decorations, the smell of pine trees, the sparkle of tinsel. I love holiday baking (though I'm not, interestingly enough, all that eager to eat sweet things...I just like to make them), the scent of roasting turkeys, the tastes of hot cider and warm cocoa. But most of all, I love holiday shopping.

Not the kind of shopping that involves driving to a mall and elbowing my way through teeming crowds of people who manage to take all the joy out of the season with their frantic and single-minded focus on getting the best deals for every item of their lists. That kind of shopping gives me hives and makes me consider if it would really be so bad to live the rest of my life as a hermetic shut-in. I love online shopping. My mouse is my friend. And I love catalog shopping, something that the retailers of this world have long since figured out and decided to exploit to the nth degree. Every day now, the mail contains at least 2 or 3 (sometimes 5 or 6) glossy-paged pamphlets from those persistent purveyors of taunting temptation (hee hee...I love excessive alliteration sometimes).

The catalogs work on me with a sort of hypnotic power. One look, and I get sucked in for hours, flipping slowly past artfully posed photographs of things no one ever actually needs but that I find myself suddenly coveting in a way that I'm certain the Old Testament would have included on those stone tablets if there had been just a bit more forward thinking. And somehow, I always end up finding 2 things that I must have for every 1 item that might make a suitable gift for someone on my list. I'm telling you, I'm weak.

Today, I'm up against a clothing company, the National Geographic store, and Bas Blu--the most fabulous bookseller on the face of the earth.

I'm such a goner.

Worse yet, so is my credit card!